Joint Resource Allocation and Dynamic Base Station Activation in Energy Harvesting HetNets

We jointly investigate resource allocation along with dynamic activation of energy harvesting base stations in a two-tier heterogeneous network (HetNet) under energy harvesting as well as interference constraints. Considering the varying channel condition, user activity, and arrival of harvested energy in different time slots, we determine resource allocation and dynamic activation of energy harvesting base stations in the small cells (hotspots) to optimize the trade-off between throughput performance of the hotspot users and the associated power cost, while satisfying the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of all hotspot and macrocell users. To optimize the trade-off, we associate positive reward for the achievable throughput of the hotspot users and negative reward for the corresponding non-renewable power consumption at the small base station or macro base station and maximize the net reward over a number of time slots. We propose an offline resource allocation algorithm using discrete binary particle swarm optimization and dual decomposition technique. We use numerical results to analyze and compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with two baseline schemes.